Never Fair
by Ravenrei
Summary: After a long time, a new story! Life may not be fair, but that doesn't meant it isn't worth it.


Never Fair  
by Raven Reimiss

As she sat in the classroom, idly hearing a teacher drone on about math problems, a thought passed through her mind.

'Sometimes,' she decided, 'life just isn't fair.'

She never asked for any of this. She never hoped to be anything but an ordinary girl, loved by her family, who got good if not excellent grades in school and had people in her life who cared about her and she about them. She hoped to have a decent life, a good career if it went beyond her family's shrine grounds, and a family of her own someday.

She certainly never had any daydreams about traveling into the past and fighting youkai. The man of her dreams had been simple, probably a salaryman. He had never been envisioned as a fierce hanyou with long, silver hair and flashing golden eyes. Not to mention dog ears—no, Mr. Right had never had those on top of his head. Well, at least he didn't until she met Inuyasha.

Of course, when she met him, everything seemed to change in an instant. Her world became more than just the routine of going to school, eating, studying, sleeping, and starting the whole thing over the next morning. When she found him pinned to the Goshinboku she gained a new world, a second life to lead. Now she had two lives; one in the present day as a fifteen-year-old girl who lived at a shrine and was just an ordinary middle school student preparing for high school entrance exams, the other in the Sengoku Jidai as a miko-in-training who searched for shards of a broken yet powerful jewel and was hunting down a great evil alongside friends wronged by him.

It wasn't fair that she had to put up with this, that she had to lead this double life. It was a massive strain on her mind and her performance on both sides of the well. To her, it was no wonder that her grades suffered when she spent so much time in the past, or that her hanyou companion got sat so often when he dragged her back from the present. That was simply how she coped with things.

Of course, as she tapped her pencil lightly against her desk and stared at the smoggy-clouded sky outside the classroom window, she found she didn't regret any of it.

Yes, it would be wonderful to spend more time with her friends here, to go shopping or just see a movie with them every once in a while. She would even just like to be able to truthfully tell Yuka, Eri, and Ayumi-chan about her travels in the Sengoku Jidai instead of half-truths about rude, jealous, two-timers and those he threatened if they laid a hand on her. But those were things she just couldn't do. She thought about how innocent she had been to the ways of the world before her time when she first fell through the well and mentally shook her head once more against telling them. Her friends need not hear about bloodthirsty youkai, tales of trickery and betrayal, and the hardships caused by those who yearned for power. No, better for them to remain in the dark. The world they lived in was bad enough; they need not hear about one they can't even attempt to touch.

She'd love to spend more than a few nights in a row in her own bed, surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of home, even if the freshness of the air and the cleanliness of the land in the past were things she sometimes longed for. She had a job to do, though, and she would stick to it until it was done. She didn't regret that she had to leave the life she'd known for so long on a regular basis because she knew her purpose was a worthwhile one.

Nor did she regret falling through time and having to fulfill the quest for the Shikon no Tama. Granted, a little part of her would always wish that the miko had not been resurrected as the shell of a woman she was now. Whether or not it would have helped her win her hanyou's heart, it certainly would've focused their journey a bit more. The kami knew they needed some extra focus sometimes.

No, she could never regret the events of her fifteenth birthday and all that happened afterward. Through those experiences she had met some of her closest friends, created a second family (though exact roles people played in that family were still being worked out) for herself, and found love. Not too bad a turnout in her opinion, all things considered. Sure, it wasn't how she'd imagined her life, but the basic elements were there, and that's what counted the most.

She was tossed from her thoughts rather abruptly as the teacher called out her name, asking for the answer to an equation she hadn't the first clue about solving. One last idea filtered through as her brain struggled to bring up geometric concepts out of a mish-mash of information on healing herbs and creatures her classmates only considered folklore.

'Life may not fair, but it's worth every moment.'


End file.
